Notes

Imagine the internet as a giant road map consisting of highways and bridges spanning out in all directions. This map is connecting the world, allowing users to access practically any piece of information from anywhere in an instant. Now imagine some giant roadblocks in this road map, preventing you from accessing certain pieces of data. This oversimplification is an example of internet censorship.
This can be done in a variety of ways. Some of these include commercial products that parents can implement on their personal networks to prevent children from accessing inappropriate materials using blacklists and keyword blocking. These concepts can be applied at the national level across entire universities, companies, and even countries. Certain IP addresses can be denied and if the website is connected to a shared hosting server, it means that every website on the server will be blocked. Entire domain names can be blocked causing the computer to never resolve the request or returning an incorrect IP address. DNS filtering also affects IP-based protocols like HTTP, FTP, and POP.
But why go through all of that hassle? Politically, countries can block views contrary to what the government believes in. They can also shut their citizens out from content related to social causes like human rights or religious movements. Socially, web pages that a country thinks are offensive can be blocked. Security wise, countries can prevent news of a war or dissent from reaching the rest of the world to keep the conflict hidden. Also this prevents the possibility of another nation coming in to help either side.
Overall, internet censorship while beneficial on a commercial level so parents have some control over the vast internet can be extremely harmful when applied on a larger scale. Citizens have the right to know what is going on around the world and have access to hearing and understanding differing opinions thus limiting personal freedom.